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Abstract
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Police officers in the United States are empowered to, among other things, detain and search civilians, and these decisions affect individual liberties, public safety, and police-community relations. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that police officers initiated contact with 28.9 million residents in 2018.1 In this Article, we argue that data-informed changes to routine, discretionary policing practices could increase public safety and improve relationships between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.
Four parts follow this introduction. In Part I, we provide a brief overview of the policy landscape for police detentions and searches. We argue that the vagueness of the legal standards can be compounded by a lack of specificity in written department policies, providing officers with broad discretion. These conditions often lead officers to conduct stops and searches, which have serious impact on citizens' lives, based on highly ambiguous information and with considerable uncertainty. In Part II, we link the inherent ambiguity of policing decisions to psychological research, which has shown that judgments made under these conditions are vulnerable to biases. Because police, like most people, tend to hold stereotypes associating Black Americans with crime, the high discretion and ambiguity associated with most stop and search decisions contribute to racial disparities in law enforcement outcomes. In Part III, we describe three situations where restrictions on discretion are associated with increases in efficiency and reductions in disparities. In Part IV, we discuss the benefits and costs of police stops and searches in addition to recent policy changes that limit officer discretion in some states and agencies.
Available at: https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/ucilr/vol11/iss5/6 |